Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  This manner of taking things was quite unexpected by Diana. It was much more pleasant than gloomy despair or sullen resentment; but it was, at the same time, much more difficult to deal with.

  “He is gone!” cried Gustave presently; “he is on the topmost heights of Caucasus, and the vultures are sharpening their beaks! And now, tell me, Diane — you will be my wife, will you not? You will be a mother to my children? You will transform the old chateau of Côtenoir into a pleasant home? You will cease to live amongst strangers? You will come to those who will love and cherish you as their own, their dearest and best and brightest? You will give your poor old father a corner by your fireside? He is old and needs a home for his last years. For his sake, Diane, for mine, for my children, let your answer be yes! Ah, not so fast!” he cried, as she was about to speak. “Why are you so quick to pronounce your fatal judgment? Think how much depends on your reply — your father’s happiness, my children’s, mine!”

  “It is of yours only I must think,” Miss Paget answered earnestly. “You fancy it is so easy for me to say no. Believe me, it would be much easier to say yes. When you speak of my father’s declining years, I, who know his weary life so well, would be hard of heart indeed if I were not tempted by the haven you offer. Every word that you say gives me some new proof of your goodness, your generosity. But I will not wrong you because you are generous. I shall always be your grateful friend, but you must seek elsewhere for a wife, M. Lenoble. You will have little difficulty in finding one worthier than I.”

  “I will seek nowhere else for a wife; I will have no wife but you. I have had a wife of other people’s choosing; I will choose one for myself this time. Let us be friends, Diane, since your decision is as irrevocable as the laws of Draco. You are stone, you are adamant; but no matter, we can be friends. Your father will be disappointed. But what then? He is no doubt accustomed to disappointments. My daughters — for them it is a profound affliction to be motherless, but they must support it. Côtenoir must go to wreck and ruin a little longer — a few more rats behind the panelling, a few more moths in the tapestry, that is all. My children say, ‘Papa, our home is not comfortable; all is upside-down;’ and I reply. ‘But what will you, my children? A home without a wife is always upside down.’ And then I take them between my arms, in weeping. It is a poignant picture to rend the heart. But what does it matter, Miss Paget? What is that verse of your grand Will? —

  Blow, blow, thou wintry wind;

  And let go weep the stricken land,

  While harts ungalled go play.

  Perhaps I have mixed him up somehow; but the meaning is clear.”

  A hollow-sounding and somewhat awful cough heralded the approach of Captain Paget, who entered the room at this juncture. If the Captain had prolonged his first airing, after six weeks’ confinement to the house, until this late period of the afternoon, he would have committed an imprudence which might have cost him dearly. Happily, he had done nothing of the kind, but had re-entered the house unobserved, while Diana and Gustave were conversing close to the window, having preferred to leave his fly at the end of the street, rather than to incur the hazard of interrupting a critical tête-à-tête. The interval that had elapsed since his return had been spent by the Captain in his own bedchamber, and in the immediate neighbourhood of the folding-doors between that apartment and the parlour. What he had heard had been by no means satisfactory to him; and if a look could annihilate, Miss Paget might have perished beneath the Parthian glance which her father shot at her as he came towards the window, with a stereotyped smile upon his lips and unspeakable anger in his heart.

  He had heard just enough of the conversation to know that Gustave had been rejected — Gustave, with Côtenoir and a handsome independence in the present, and the late John Haygarth’s fortune in the future. Rejected by a penniless young woman, who at any moment might find herself without a roof to shelter her from the winds of heaven! Was ever folly, madness, wickedness supreme as this?

  Horatio trembled with rage as he took his daughter’s hand. She had the insolence to extend her hand for the customary salutation. The Captain’s greeting was a grip that made her wince.

  “Good-night, Miss Paget,” said Gustave gravely, but with by no means the despondent tone of a hopeless lover; “I — well, I shall see you again, perhaps, before I go to Normandy. I doubt if I shall go to-morrow. I have my own reasons for staying — unreasonable reasons, perhaps, but I shall stay.”

  All this was said in a tone too low to reach Captain Paget’s ear.

  “Are you going to leave us, Lenoble?” he asked in a quavering voice. “You will not stop and let Di give you a cup of tea as usual?”

  “Not to-night, Captain. Good-bye.”

  He wrung the old man’s hand and departed. Captain Paget dropped heavily into a chair, and for some minutes there was silence. Diana was the first to speak.

  “I am glad your doctor considered you well enough to go out for a drive, papa,” she said.

  “Indeed, my dear,” answered her father with a groan; “I hope my next drive may be in a different kind of vehicle — the last journey I shall ever take, until they cart away my bones for manure. I believe they do make manure from the bones of paupers in our utilitarian age.”

  “Papa, how can you talk so horribly! You are better, are you not? M.

  Lenoble said you were better.”

  “Yes, I am better, God help me!” answered the old man, too weak alike in mind and body to hide the passion that possessed, him. “That is one of the contradictions of the long farce we call life. If I had been a rich man, with a circle of anxious relations and all the noted men of Savile Row dancing attendance round my bed, I dare say I should have died; but as I happen to be a penniless castaway, with only a lodging-house drudge and a half-starved apothecary to take care of me, and with nothing before me but a workhouse, I live. It is all very well for a man to take things easily when he is ill and helpless, too weak even to think. That is not the trying time. The real trial arrives when a little strength comes back to him, and his landlady begins to worry him for her rent, and the lodging-house drudge gets tired of pitying him, and the apothecary sends in his bill, and the wretched high-road lies bare and broad before him, and he hears the old order to move on. The moving-on time has come for me, Di; and the Lord alone knows how little I know where I am to go.”

  “Papa, you are not friendless; even I can give you a little help.”

  “Yes,” answered the Captain with a bitter laugh; “a sovereign once a quarter — the scrapings of your pittance! That help won’t save me from the workhouse.”

  “There is M. Lenoble.”

  “Yes, there is M. Lenoble; the man who would have given me a home for my old age: he told me so to-day — a home fit for a gentleman — for the position he now occupies is nothing compared to that which he may occupy a year hence. He would have received me as his father-in-law, without thought or question of my antecedents; and if I have not lived like a gentleman, I might have died like one. This is what he would have done for me. But do you think I can ask anything of him now, after you have refused him? I know of your refusal to be that man’s wife. I heard — I saw it in his face. You — a beggar, a friendless wretch, dependent on the patronage of a stockbroker’s silly wife — you must needs give yourself grand airs, and refuse such a man as that! Do you think such men go begging among young ladies like you, or that they run about the streets, like the roast pigs in the story, begad, with knives and forks in their backs, asking to be eaten?”

  The Captain was walking up and down the room in a fever of rage. Diana looked at him with sad wondering eyes. Yes, it was the old selfish nature. The leopard cannot change his spots; and the Horatio Paget of the present was the Horatio Paget of the past.

  “Pray don’t be angry with me, papa,” said Diana sorrowfully; “I believe that I have done my duty.”

  “Done your fiddlesticks!” cried the Captain, too angry to be careful of his diction. “Your duty to whom?
Did you happen to remember, miss, that you owe some duty to me, your father, but for whom you wouldn’t be standing there talking of duty like a tragedy queen? By Jove! I suppose you are too grand a person to consider my trouble in this matter; the pains I took to get Lenoble over to England; the way I made the most of my gout even, in order to have you about me; the way I finessed and diplomatized to bring this affair to a successful issue. And now, when I have succeeded beyond my hopes, you spoil everything, and then dare to stand before me and preach about duty. What do you want in a husband, I should like to know? A rich man? Lenoble is that. A handsome man? Lenoble is that. A gentleman, with good blood in his veins? Lenoble comes of as pure a race as any man in that part of France. A good man? Lenoble is one of the best fellows upon this earth. What is it, then, that you want?”

  “I want to give my heart to the man who gives me his.”

  “And what, in the name of all that’s preposterous, is to prevent you giving Gustave Lenoble your heart?”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “No, nor any one else. But let us have no more of this nonsense. If you call yourself a daughter of mine, you will marry Gustave Lenoble. If not—”

  The Captain found himself brought to a sudden stop in his unconscious paraphrase of Signor Capulet’s menace to his recalcitrant daughter, Juliet. With what threat could the noble Horatio terrify his daughter to obedience? Before you talk of turning your rebellious child out of doors, you must provide a home from which to cast her. Captain Paget remembered this, and was for the moment reduced to sudden and ignominious silence. And yet there must surely be some way of bringing this besotted young woman to reason.

  He sat for some minutes in silence, with his head leaning on his hand, his face hidden from Diana. This silence, this attitude, so expressive of utter despondency, touched her more keenly than his anger. She knew that he was mean and selfish, that it was of his own loss he thought; and yet she pitied him. He was old and helpless and miserable; so much the more pitiable because of his selfishness and meanness. For the heroic soul there is always some comfort; but for the grovelling nature suffering knows no counterbalance. The ills that flesh is heir to seem utterly bitter when there is no grand spirit to dominate the flesh, and soar triumphant above the regions of earthly pain. Captain Paget’s mind, to him, was not a kingdom. He could not look declining years of poverty in the face; he was tired of work. The schemes and trickeries of his life were becoming very odious to him; they were for the most part worn out, and had ceased to pay. Of course he had great hopes, in any event, from Gustave Lenoble; but those hopes were dependent on Gustave’s inheritance of John Haygarth’s estate. He wanted something more tangible than this — he wanted immediate security; and his daughter’s marriage with Gustave would have given him that security, and still grander hopes for the future. He had fancied himself reigning over the vassals of Côtenoir, a far more important personage than the real master of that château. He had pictured to himself a pied-à-terre in Paris which it might be agreeable for him to secure, for existence in Normandy might occasionally prove ennuyeux. These things were what he meant when he talked of a haven for his declining years; and against the daughter who, for some caprice of her own, could hinder his possession of these things, he had no feeling but anger.

  Diana compassionated this weak old man, to whose lips the cup of prosperity had seemed so near, from whose lips her hand had thrust it. He had been promised a home, comfort, respectability, friendship—”all that should accompany old age” — and she had prevented the fulfilment of the promise. Heaven knows how pure her motives had been; but as she watched that drooping head, with its silvered hair, she felt that she had been cruel.

  “Papa,” she began presently, laying her hand caressingly upon her father’s neck; but he pushed aside the timid, caressing hand—”papa, you think me very unkind, only because I have done what I believe to be right; indeed it is so, papa dear. In what I said to Gustave Lenoble this evening, I was governed only by my sense of right.”

  “Indeed!” cried the Captain, with a strident laugh; “and where did you pick up your sense of right, madam, I should like to know? From what Methodist parson’s hypocritical twaddle have you learnt to lay down the law to your poor old father about the sense of right? ‘Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,’ miss, that’s what your Bible teaches you; but the Bible has gone out of fashion, I dare say, since I was a young man; and your model young woman of the present generation taunts her father with her sense of right. Will your sense of right be satisfied when you hear of your father rotting in the old-men’s ward of a workhouse, or dying on the London stones?”

  “I am not unfeeling, papa. With all my heart I pity you; but it is cruel on your part to exaggerate the misery of your position, as I am sure you must be doing. Why should your means of living fail because I refuse to marry M. Lenoble? You have lived hitherto without my help, as I have lived of late without yours. Nothing could give me greater happiness than to know that you were exempt from care; and if my toil can procure you a peaceful home in the future — as I believe it can, or education and will to work must go for nothing — there shall be no lack of industry on my part. I will work for you, I will indeed, papa — willingly, happily.”

  “When your work can give me such a home as Côtenoir — a home that one word of yours would secure for me — I will thank you.”

  “If you will only wait, papa, if you will only have patience—”

  “Patience! Wait! Do you know what you are talking about? Do you prate of patience, and waiting, and hope in the future to a man who has no future — to a man whose days are numbered, and who feels the creeping chills of death stealing over him every day as he sits beside his wretched hearth, or labours through his daily drudgery? I can live as I have always lived! Yes; but do you know, or care to know, that with every day life becomes more difficult for me? Your fine friends at Bayswater have done with me. I have spent the last sixpence I shall ever see from Philip Sheldon. Hawkehurst has cut me, like the ungrateful hound he is. When they have squeezed the orange, they throw away the rind. Didn’t Voltaire say that, when Frederick of Prussia gave him the go-by? Heaven knows it’s true enough; and now you, who by a word might secure yourself a splendid position — yes, I say splendid for a poor drudge and dependent like you, and insure a home for me — you, forsooth, must needs favour me with your high-flown sentiments about your sense of right, and promise me a home in the future, if I will wait and hope! No, Diana, waiting and hoping are done with for me, and I can find a home in the bed of the river without your help.”

  “You would not be so wicked as to do that!” cried Diana, aghast.

  “I don’t know about the wickedness of the act. But, rely upon it, when my choice lies between the workhouse and the river, I shall prefer the river. The modern workhouse is no inviting sanctuary, and I dare say many a homeless wretch makes the same choice.”

  For some minutes there was silence. Diana stood with her elbows resting on the chimneypiece, her face covered with her hands.

  “O Lord, teach me to do the thing which is right!” she prayed, and in the next breath acted on the impulse of the moment.

  “What would you have me do?” she asked.

  “What any one but an idiot would do of her own accord — accept the good fortune that has dropped into your lap. Do you think such luck as yours goes begging every day?”

  “You would have me accept Gustave Lenoble’s offer, no matter what falsehoods may be involved in my acceptance of it?”

  “I can see no reason for falsehood. Any one but an idiot would honour such a man; any one but an idiot would thank Providence for such good fortune.”

  “Very well, papa,” exclaimed Diana, with a laugh that had no mirthful music, “I will not be the exceptional idiot. If M. Lenoble does me the honour to repeat his offer — and I think from his manner he means to do so — I will accept it.”

  “He shall repeat it!” cried the C
aptain, throwing off his assumption of the tragic father. The Oedipus Coloneus, the Lear — the venerable victim of winter winds and men’s ingratitude — was transformed in a moment into an elderly Jeremy Diddler, lined with Lord Foppington. “He shall repeat it; I will have him at your feet to-morrow. Yes, Di, my love, I pledge myself to bring that about, without compromise to your maidenly pride or the dignity of a Paget. My dear child, I ought to have known that reflection would show you where your duty lies. I fear I have been somewhat harsh, but you must forgive me, Di; I have set my heart on this match, for your happiness as well as my own. I could not stand the disappointment; though I admired, and still admire, the high feeling, and all that kind of thing, which prompted your refusal. A school-girlish sentimentality, child, but with something noble in it; not the sentimentality of a vulgar schoolgirl. The blue blood will show itself, my love; and now — no, no, don’t cry. You will live to thank me for to-night’s work; yes, my child, to thank me, when you look round your comfortable home by-and-by — when my poor old bones are mouldering in their unpretending sepulchre — and say to yourself, ‘I have my father to thank for this. Adverse circumstances forbade his doing his duty as happier fathers are allowed the privilege of doing theirs, but it was his forethought, his ever-watchful care, which secured me an admirable husband and a happy home.’ Mark my words, the time will come when you will say this, my dear.”

  “I will try to think of you always kindly, papa,” Miss Paget answered in a low sad voice; “and if my marriage can secure your happiness and Gustave Lenoble’s, I am content. I only fear to take too much, and give too little.”